Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Rare Consensus Inside Beltway

WASHINGTON — Let’s face it, the exit polls were not great at Nationals Park on Wednesday. The home team performed much like the incumbent did in last week’s presidential debate — lackluster, not a lot of pop at the plate and a defense that could not handle an aggressive assault.

Still, painful as the Cardinals’ 8-0 shellacking of the Washington Nationals was, the real October Surprise was that playoff baseball was here at all, a mere 28,858 days since its last appearance in the nation’s capital. How long has the city been waiting for this? Put it this way: the current president was not born the last time Washington played in the postseason. Actually, even the president’s mother was not born.

So for the first time since 1933, the lawyers, lobbyists, regulators, journalists, bureaucrats and consultants who run this city — and, in a way, the world — put aside their partisan hats in favor of the red caps with the curly W and took themselves out to the ballgame. The same people rooting for President Obama to muff his next debate chanted “Let’s go, Nats” alongside the people cheering for Mitt Romney to go after Big Bird again.

Photo

Fans on Wednesday at the first postseason baseball game played in Washington in 79 years.Credit
Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press

“Baseball has a way of normalizing Washington,” said Walter E. Dellinger, a former acting solicitor general and one of the nation’s leading lawyers before the Supreme Court. “Baseball is what people around America do. It makes us more like Milwaukee or St. Louis to follow baseball and not to litigate over Dodd-Frank.”

This being Washington, there were still plenty of fans sneaking peeks at their BlackBerrys or obsessively typing into their iPhones — possibly over the latest challenge to Dodd-Frank (which is not a promising left-hander but a law cracking down on Wall Street).

But amid the fireworks and the F-16 flyover, most of the record-setting 45,017-strong crowd was poring over not the latest Gallup poll cross-tabs but the slugging percentages of the St. Louis Cardinals. The only presidential race anyone cared about was the one won by the Teddy Roosevelt mascot.

“Columns come to me every week; elections every four years,” said Charles Krauthammer, the syndicated writer and Fox News commentator. “Playoffs in Washington? Every 79. Which would you choose? For God’s sake, Halley’s comet comes more often.”

Photo

President Franklin D. Roosevelt before Game 3 of the 1933 World Series.Credit
Associated Press

Indeed, at least three Sunday news-program hosts skipped work. Bob Schieffer of “Face the Nation” on CBS rushed here after a meeting on Thursday’s vice presidential debate. Major League Baseball lined up David Gregory of “Meet the Press” on NBC to tweet from the game. Chris Wallace of “Fox News Sunday” said, “I haven’t been this excited since I played hooky in grade school to go see the Yankees play in the World Series.”

Not everyone made it. The president, who lavished praise on the Nats, missed the game. Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman who wrote an essay about the team in The Wall Street Journal, was in India for a conference. Senators Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell, the Democratic and Republican leaders who agree on only one thing, the Nats, were rooting from their home states of Nevada and Kentucky.

Many here were upset at Major League Baseball for waiting so long to announce the 1 p.m. start time for Wednesday’s game and for scheduling it during a workday in a workaholic town. But for a city that lost its last team in 1971 and had to wait until 2005 to get another, that was a relatively minor grievance.

David H. Petraeus, the C.I.A. director and retired Army general, who was among those who could not attend, explained the nexus between politics and baseball simply: “Everybody loves a winner.”

Photo

Frank Robinson was the Nationals’ manager when the team arrived from Montreal in 2005.Credit
Gary Cameron/Reuters

Thomas M. Davis III, a former congressman and leading supporter of bringing baseball back to Washington, added by e-mail that “at a time of deep partisan divisions in the nation’s capital, the only good news coming out of Washington is the Nats.”

That reflects quite a turnaround for a city that typically reserves its nonpolitical passions for the Redskins. But with baseball’s best record, the Nats are finally commanding attention. “It was not until this year that the city really embraced them,” said Mark Yecies, a retired tax attorney who attended 60 games this year. “They’re starting to see what I found so compelling. It means a lot to the city.”

For Washington baseball fans, the term “long suffering” does not begin to capture it.

“We saw teams that were so bad,” recalled Donald E. Graham, the Washington Post Company chairman dressed in Nats red. “I saw my first game in 1948, and since then I have never rooted for a team in Washington that finished first, second or third. This isn’t the Cubs not winning the World Series. We were never in contention. This is heaven.”

Al Hunt, the Washington bureau chief for Bloomberg News, seated not far away, has had season tickets since 2005. “I’ve been a baseball fan for 60 years, and I’ve never been more excited than I’ve been this year,” he said. “I love this team.”

Hunt plans to be back Thursday afternoon, even if the action bumps up against the vice presidential debate. “If the game goes late,” he said, “someone else will have to manage the coverage.”

Brian Stelter contributed reporting from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on October 11, 2012, on page B12 of the New York edition with the headline: Rare Consensus Inside Beltway. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe